State Control

Reporters Without Borders appealed for the release of Michel Kilo, Muhened Abdulrahman and Habib Saleh today, on the eve of President Bashar Al-Assad’s swearing-in tomorrow for a second seven-year term. “Assad’s first term as president was marked by many arrests of Syrian journalists and activists,” the press freedom organisation said. “The state of emergency that has been in effect since 1963 is...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned a purge of staff last week at Minzhu yu Fazhi Shibao (Democracy and Legal Times), a weekly specialising in legal news that is considered to be one of China’s ten most influential newspapers. "Censorship takes different forms in China," the press freedom organisation said. "Closures of websites, blogs or newspapers are the most visible of the many press...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned a ban on the online publication China Development Brief and warned diplomats and investors in China of a growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country. The Beijing Statistics Bureau and the Public Security Bureau on 4 July ordered the site’s founder Nick Young to halt publication. The...

Reporters Without Borders today reiterated its call for Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) to be allowed to resume free terrestrial broadcasting after learning that the privately-owned broadcaster will resume transmission by cable and satellite to paying subscribers on 16 July. The government refused to renew RCTV’s terrestrial broadcast licence a month and a half ago. “Since losing its terrestrial...

Iran's leading reformist daily newspaper Hammihan (Compatriot) has been ordered closed, less than two months after it was allowed to resume publishing. Hammihan, banned in 2000 by the hardline Iranian judiciary after the newspaper called for improving Iranian ties with the United States, had resumed publishing in May this year, publisher Gholamhossein Karbaschi told the Associated Press (AP). A...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and the World Editors Forum (WEF) have called on African leaders, who are meeting in Ghana at the African Union Summit, to abolish "insult" laws and to accept the principles of press freedom set out in the Declaration of Table Mountain, which calls for the abolishment of all laws that restrict freedom of expression. The International Federation of...

The private print media in Burma is outpacing its public counterpart and registering enormous growth. Yet, instead of encouraging cooperation in the business of informing and entertaining news-thirsty readers, the government is practically choking these independent outlets, says a Mizzima News report. There are unwritten rules that have been practised by the junta since the 1962 coup that ended...

ROME - Italian journalists were on strike on Saturday in protest at a draft law banning the publication of transcripts and wiretapped conversations being used in judicial enquiries. The bill would ban the use of any court document until a case has come to trial and provides for heavy fines of tens of thousands of euros (dollars) for journalists breaking the law. It has already been passed on a...

BEIJING (AFP) - In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in. A letter posted on...

On 23 May 2007, regional UHF channel Llanovisión's news programme, "La Entrevista de Hoy", was suspended after it commented on the Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) case. The programme was hosted by sociologist Laure Nicotra and was broadcast in the state of Barinas, southern Venezuela. Nicotra said that the measure was the result of an interview with lawyer Pedro Gonzáles, broadcast on 22 May...